by Renee leNobel | Oct 15, 2015 | Divorce
Empathy is an interesting thing. I’ve always felt like I have a bit too much of it. I could easily empathize with someone who was in pain and I would spend a good chunk of my time figuring out how to help that person. If I couldn’t help them, I would feel bad.
I always thought my empathic nature was a benefit to others and just slightly detrimental to me as I spent way too much time trying to solve other people’s problems and then I would feel terrible if I couldn’t help.
Today I had a bit of an epiphany. I realized that my empathic nature has been helping me more than I ever realized. What I discovered is that having empathy for others and having an understanding of how their lives have their own hurdles, helps me reflect on my own challenges…which often seem trivial in comparison.
I start to see how my life is actually pretty wonderful and my mood swings towards being grateful for my life circumstances. I become happier and my life flows better.
Why did I have this thought today?
I was recently helping a couple who are separated have a discussion about money. They are trying to map out their financial future going forward as single parents, co-parenting their two children.
One parent is re-entering the workforce after a hiatus of six years to look after their young children. The other parent is taking on half of the parenting burden as they switch to a week on/week off parenting schedule.
The parent re-entering the workforce is uncertain of the future and how to cope with starting a new career while maintaining a hint of her prior life as a stay-at-home parent. She is afraid her kids will think she is abandoning them and she also knows she will miss being with them when they are at their dad’s home.
The parent taking on more parenting could not get past the fact that he would still be contributing money to the other parent while looking after their children 50% the time. He thinks he just took on 50% more work without seeing any benefit at all.
As they talked they got more and more entrenched in their individual positions and I could tell they had stopped listening to each other.
As I watched their dialogue deteriorate, I thought about how their inability to see each other’s perspective was hurting each of them. I don’t know what they were feeling, but their language indicated that they were both feeling like the victim in their current situation. I do know that feeling like a victim often leads to feelings of anger and depression. Before I stopped them, they had gotten to the point where they were searching their memories for other instances where each perceived that they had been treated unfairly. Their focus became who had it harder in life.
Now – this couple is very angry with each other, but I kept thinking – wouldn’t it be nice if they could each see each other’s perspective?
What if they both recognized that the other person had similar fears and concerns? Both of them are starting something new and both have fear of the future. If they could each put themselves in the other’s shoes, they would each stop focusing on the negative aspects of their own lives. Instead of using all their emotional resources to shore up their own feelings of hurt, they might start thinking about how the other person had it equally bad and then maybe, just maybe, they might start trying to think up solutions to help the other person.
This would be natural collaboration. And where did this natural collaboration come from? It came from empathy and understanding of the other person.
I realize that with this couple, this is too big a challenge at this point, they dislike each other too much. So that is why I suggested taking a breather from the discussion. Perhaps time and distance will allow their natural empathies to grow and we can get back on the subject of their hopeful futures another day.
by Renee leNobel | Aug 27, 2015 | Divorce
Are you in the middle of a Transition Day?. Perhaps you feel like ?
There are two types of transition days. The ones where the kids leave to go stay with their other parent and the ones where the kids come back to you.
Let’s deal with the leaving days first…
The first thing to do is ensure your remaining minutes before saying goodbye to your kids are positive. Minutes? Yes, minutes. This is your first challenge, and it is a challenge. Getting your kids packed up and ready to go to the other parent’s house is stressful and added to that, kids rarely (in my experience) cooperate when getting ready. It is hard to remain calm when your kid won’t stop what they are doing to put their shoes on and it is made doubly hard when you would rather they weren’t leaving at all.
So how do you stay calm and not have your remaining minutes with the kids be ones that are filled with yelling? Practice. Practice telling yourself that this a hard situation you are in and practice giving yourself a break if you do yell. Apologise to your child if you yell and tell them why. Then remember to say you love them and that you will see them soon. Then remind yourself that you will get many more times to practice this skill and with time it will get better.
As you are getting your child ready to go to the other parent’s house, be aware of that feeling that may be rising in you that is going to lead to yelling. This is an opportunity to remind yourself that the kids are leaving soon and it doesn’t matter if they forget stuff or are late. It’s also a good time to remember that your kids are smart and this is a perfect opportunity for them to learn about natural consequences. You can help remind them about what they will need, you can help them pack and you can be waiting for them outside for when they are ready to go. Sit down and take deep breaths while you wait.
Establish a rule with your children that they must always look you in the eye to say goodbye. There is nothing worse than having your child run off without looking back when you get to the destination, whether they leave right from your home or a place you drive them to. You do not want your last memory before a 2, 4 day or even a week long stretch without your kids to be the back of your child’s head sprinting away from you as you think to yourself – “I didn’t even get to say goodbye! What if something happens to one of us!”
Then your kids are gone – you may have to be somewhere or not. You may have decided to fill up your time so you don’t think about your missing child or you may have excess time on your hands now that they are gone. If you have excess time, you may find grief starts to seep in. Allow the grief in and sit with it for a while. Powering through an emotion or burying it will mean you never learn to deal with it. Instead, if you face it head on and give yourself a break for being sad, you will find that eventually, with time, these grief periods will get shorter in duration.
Then remind yourself that it will never go according to plan. Things happen, so don’t beat yourself up if the plan you made for “how things are now going to be next time the kids leave” does not go the way you envisioned. After all, you made that plan when the kids weren’t with you and the push and pull of a relationship with kids never goes according to your plans.
That said, don’t give up on making those plans because eventually over time parts of them will begin to creep in (in a good way), to your transition days.
by Renee leNobel | Aug 7, 2015 | Divorce
When you think of your life up until this point does it make you happy or do you focus on the negative aspects of your past and use it as an excuse to stop moving forward?
How we view the past often depends on how we perceive our present life. If you are living with challenging circumstances, it is hard not to let your current situation influence your thoughts about the past, present and future.
When I was going through my divorce I was looking for proof of how I had gotten to that point. In the thick of my divorce process, every memory of shared moments with my ex took on a negative hue. I would mine my memories for proof that I was never meant to marry that person. Then I would beat myself up for having been so stupid. Clearly, every memory indicated that we were not supposed to be together – how could it have taken me 20 years to realise this? So I decided to try not to think about it at all.
As I had shared 20 years of my life with this person, I wiped out a good chunk of happy memories. In addition, I reasoned that childhood had led me to my partner of 20 years and so I wrote my childhood memories off as well. My life path had led me to one big point of failure – divorce. Failure kept going through my brain. All I had left was one failed marriage, no career and unhappy kids.
People and self-help books advised me to remember the good moments I had shared with my ex, to hopefully prevent me from what I was doing which was allowing my past to overshadow my present and future. Because that is what I was doing; I was projecting my past into my future and that was stopping me in my tracks. What was the point of having a future that looked like my very unhappy past?
My coach helped me find a way out of these circular and self-defeating thoughts and she did this by helping me change my thoughts about the present.
My coach first told me that it wasn’t my life that had failed. It was simply my relationship with one person. Then she helped me define what success means to me and helped me find proof that I had succeeded according to my own terms of success.
After that, my past started to take on a different hue. I was now focussing on how I had succeeded in life according to my own definition of success. Once I started to see how I had in fact succeeded, my coach pointed out that my past had gotten me to where I was. All those things I perceived as mistakes were actually lessons designed specifically for me to get me closer to what I wanted out of life.
This was by no means a quick fix. It took time and practice.
But the recipe is clear. Look for success in your present life and the positive evidence you find will carry back to your past memories and forward into your hopeful future.
by Renee leNobel | Jul 31, 2015 | Divorce
I had an uncomfortable conversation with a friend last night. She is in the middle of a very bitter divorce and she is feeling fearful of the outcome which will be decided by a judge.
A brief history of her situation.
Let’s call her Sara. Sara is getting divorced from her husband. They have two young children and she has been the main breadwinner in their family although her husband has been working in a less lucrative career.
I had always assumed that Sara loved her job. She is outwardly successful, very outgoing and has a good group of friends that she both works with and socialises with. Last night I found out that I had made a wrong assumption. Sara does not love her job and has really only stayed in it to support her family. Her dream is to start up her own company but she now feels like she can’t because the court will perceive that she is simply attempting to get out of her obligation to pay spousal support and child support.
Then she went further and talked about how her ex has been purposely underemployed for years (he stepped away from a well paying job to start his own business just before the kids were born) and it is his obligation to go back to a job that he is perfectly capable of doing and that pays more than his current situation.
Essentially, what she was saying is that it is naive to think we can all follow our dreams. Our discussion got a little bit heated and she stated at one point “everyone has to work, it’s just a rule of society.” The other thought behind her comment was that everyone has to take the best paying job they can get even if they are not happy. Sara’s ex is currently choosing to be underemployed and she has to bear the brunt of his choice. She has to stay in a job she doesn’t like because the rules of society say so.
After my discussion with Sara I thought about everything she had said. I was rather upset about a number of things which I will refer to as Sara’s rules:
The first rule: everyone has to suck it up and take the highest paying job they are capable of if they have kids and responsibilities. To do otherwise is flaky and selfish.
The second rule: work generally sucks. Everyone would rather retire if they could. Within this rule is a sub-rule. If you like what you’re doing, it’s not work.
The third rule: life is inherently unfair. Simply because Sara held the higher paying job at the time of her separation from her husband, she would forever have to pay child support and spousal support based on that situation.
I must say our conversation kept me up last night. I immediately got defensive and I lay there in bed coming up with arguments against the rules. Thank goodness that when I finally fell asleep my brain let those arguments go and gave me some better thoughts for when I woke up.
The first thing that my brain reminded me was that defensiveness keeps us locked into buying into made up rules and opinions. Because I was putting up opposing arguments to Sara’s rules, I was turning them into facts instead of just one person’s opinions. I was holding Sara’s arguments out as truth and was trying to pick holes in them. Instead, I now recognize that her rules are just one person’s opinion (and yes, I would say her rules are the prevalent opinions in society). They are opinions based in fear and the worst case scenario. They are not the default outcome for Sara’s life. They are outcomes that likely have a higher probability of occurring. Especially if Sara resigns herself to the fact that these rules are true and that life is unfair.
This led me to the second thought which was that Sara’s ideas are keeping her trapped.
It appears to me that Sara has given up on her dreams. She is hiding behind these rules she has created for herself; she has turned her rules into hard and fast facts of the world that she has no control over.
So I’m going to call Sara back. I want to hold out her rules for her to see and I’m going to ask her if they are the ones she wants to live by.
Instead, I hope Sara agrees to letting me help her find out what drives her and what gives her hope. I will help her get clarity about where she is in life from a financial perspective and from a personal values perspective. Then I’m hoping Sara will see that she does have choice in her life and it is not these rules that she has created for herself and bought into that are controlling the outcome of her life.
by Renee leNobel | May 20, 2015 | Divorce
When my ex and I first separated, I spent a long time trying to craft my emails to my ex so that there was nothing offensive in them. I did not want him to attack back as reading those attacks was pretty painful. How could this person that I had been a partner to for 20 years, whom I’d had children with, whom I’d put first in life, write these things about me?
So I spent hours crafting my emails to try to be clear and concise, without blame and without judgement.
I would still get attack emails back. There was always something that got misinterpreted by him.
I would try to defend myself and would again, take the time to carefully write my email and I would still get upsetting emails back.
This was brutal. He found ways to tear down all my defenses and invade my boundaries.
One day, something happened that put me over the edge. I was exhausted by this back and forth conflict. I needed to move on with my life and get out of this viscous cycle.
I started following the rules I created for myself:
- Keep emails short – five sentences maximum
- Wait a day or two after getting an icky reply before replying back.
- Do not defend myself, especially if he asks me to. I’m just giving him more opportunities to attack my values and beliefs
- Do not discuss my email communication between myself and my ex with others
These rules are very hard to stick to but I’m getting lots of practice and if you are recently separated, I bet you are too.
